Graham Greene said that Travels with My Aunt was the only one of his works he ever wrote simply for the fun of it. Though many critics agree that it is not his best piece, there must be something worthwhile about the novel: 35 years after publication, the book is still in print. It has also been adapted for the stage and the play is still performed regularly.

The story is told from the perspective of Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager in the stolid English tradition. He is bland, conservative in an apolitical manner and a lifelong bachelor. As a hobby, he cultivates dahlias. His regular, regulated existence begins to change at the cremation of his mother, where he meets for the first time in many years his mother's sister, his Aunt Augusta.

Aunt Augusta, you see, has lived, while Henry has just been going through the motions decently and quietly for all the decades of his life. "I have been happy," he says in the end, "but I have been bored for so long." Aunt Augusta changes all that with her implacable love of travel and blithe disregard for all the niceties of proper English society. There is no room for even the merest whiff of boredom in her life. Soon Henry finds himself pulled along in her ungainsayable wake, accompanying his aged aunt to Istanbul and France and South America on trips of dubious purpose. And suddenly, he realizes that he has a choice: between the predictable suburban world he has always known and the vaguely dangerous twilight world his aunt inhabits as her natural medium.

Greene's novel is yet another example of the English melodrama that is all to do with the individual wakening (often with one foot in the grave) from the deadening strictures of English convention. These sorts of novels are legion. (See The Remains of the Day, A Room with a View, etc.) And so Travels with My Aunt can hardly be considered groundbreaking. In fact, it seems in many ways to hearken back to the good old, bad old days of the British Empire. But taken on its own the novel is not without merits.

Travels with My Aunt is well structured and tightly written, at least up till very near the end. Early on, Henry learns from his aunt that the mother he saw decently cremated was not in fact his biological mother. Aunt Augusta of course knows the truth of the matter, but Greene is not one to allow his characters to fritter away such secrets casually or too early in the game. Greene does not need so tired a motif to keep his readers interested. I found the meandering story quite readable and engaging, and the characters well developed.

I liked Greene's economy of writing, which shows a keen intelligence on his part in my opinion. Few novelists show the respect for their readers and the confidence in their own powers to refrain from adding extraneous material. There is no chaff to be trimmed from this novel, and that is altogether too rare a thing to pass by without noticing and appreciating. The humor, if there is any in this short novel, is quite dry. But I liked all the characters in the story, even when they bordered on caricature. Greene infused each of them with enough depth to inspire affection for their waywardness.

Only towards the very end of the book was I disappointed. It seemed to me as though Greene didn't have a very good sense of what he wanted his characters to do, how he wanted to wrap up their story. The ending seemed a little too arbitrary, too abrupt and just so to me; certainly the ending failed to pass the "inevitability test" that is commonly applied to novels. I had greater hopes for the main characters and felt that none of them received their due.

It must also be said that there is a certain degree of casual racism in Travels with My Aunt. Published in 1969, the story reflects the pat assumptions of white superiority that characterized the era. Though racism can never be called benign, I sensed no true antipathy for non-whites on the part of the author, merely the notions of a society so thoroughly entrenched in its own perceptions that the display of overt racial hostility would have been puzzling or unseemly. Still, this is an element of the book which cannot be dismissed.

I would recommend Travels with My Aunt for a good but not great quick read. There are some references to drugs and sex which might make some parents prefer that their teenagers not read it, but certainly nothing explicit. I think it would be appropriate reading for anyone above the age of fifteen or sixteen, though I frankly doubt that many in that age group would be interested.

Recommended: Yes